Are You Ready for the SiBM Developer Challenges?

Fall is officially here, but we’re still Springing into Bluemix! Hopefully you’ve been following (or competing) in the challenges thus far, and are as excited as I am to see what’s coming up. While the first few months have had a heavy design focus, we’re going to focus more on development in the coming months with some awesome new challenges.

I’ve been working with the IBM teams for a number of years and am blown away by the projects they’ve been building out. That’s why we decided to launch the SiBM series in the first place — to give our community the chance to compete alongside some of the brightest minds in our industry, while becoming experts in some of the coolest technologies (like Cloud Foundry and Watson). And of course, the chance for you to win some major cash.

In addition to our regular challenge prizes, we have also created a SiBM Code Blitz program. You can accumulate points by participating in the SiBM development challenges and claim bonus prizes from the pool. The August bonus prizes totaled $4,400.

If you’re new to Bluemix, we have prepared some fun challenges to get you started. I personally designed some of them. These are quick challenges — they’ll only take you about an hour — and will give you a sense of how to approach a typical project, how it’s structured, how to connect to the services bound to the app, and how to deploy to Bluemix. We have given out over $3,500 in prizes just for trying Bluemix out.

You can find a lot of the popular languages and services in the Bluemix catalog. Apart from the infrastructure components, it also comes with the IBM Watson services, which cover natural language processing, visual recognition, and machine learning, as well as prototyping tools like Node RED. These allow you to turn your ideas into an application quickly. There are a number of links under the resources menu to help get you up to speed with IBM Bluemix, like videos, tutorials, and starter projects.

To compete in the development challenges, you will need to set up a free IBM Bluemix account. (We’ve worked with IBM to ensure that accounts for topcoder members don’t expire, and you won’t be charged for approved services.)

If you have any questions about IBM Bluemix or the SiBM series, don’t hesitate to reach out by posting a comment here. I would also love to hear what you think of the series so far and what you’re most excited to see in the coming months. Here’s to a great series of innovative developer challenges!